Building upon the legacy of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center

Our Voices, Our Health: Gripped by Gambling

Thursday, November 30th 2017

Our Voices, Our Health: Gripped by Gambling

Part 1: A Point of No Return

Carlos Lee’s gambling addiction left him at his lowest point in life. With the help of his son and local support groups, Carlos found a path to recovery. In the second story of the series Our Voices, Our Health, Carlos reflects with his friend and coworker, Myron Dean Quon, on his experiences with and the issue of gambling addiction in the Asian American community.

Mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment, are part of the 10 essential health benefits that Covered CA plans must cover under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Resources:

1-800-GAMBLER (426-2537) is California's largest problem gambling helpline, and is free for anyone who is concerned that they, or someone they know, may have a gambling problem. Help is available in more than 200 languages including Cantonese, Mandarin, Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, and Tagalog. The helpline is free, confidential and available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It is considered by many to be the first and most important step for problem gamblers and/or their family members throughout California to receive help.

I was born in Argentina and I went to college in Korea and then I came here to LA. I’ve been living in LA for 21 years. My gambling addiction hit its worst when I was living here over fifteen years ago, when my son was between five and ten years old.

So I would say the first 2000s decade, from 2000 to 2009, that was when my life went out of control. I got a divorce. My son — I had custody of him but I almost lost him because I couldn’t support him. It was really bad, living here in LA where gambling is so readily available for everybody.

What I’m trying to say is that what led me to gambling was: there’s a point of no return, where you decide that everything else is not important, and the important thing is to get your fix. And somehow, some way, if you hit it big, you’re gonna erase everything from the past and it’s gonna be okay. That was how it was to me.

Drugs and alcohol are different because with drugs and alcohol you always chase that initial high, but it’s almost subconscious. But here it’s a very conscious choice, you say “You know what, I’m gonna hit the jackpot and I’m gonna pay all my debts at once.” And it can happen like that, at one moment. And that’s how you chase your drug in gambling.

I’ve said this many times, but gambling is different because you’re gambling with money. And everybody loves money. So, you’re preying on the lowest common denominator of mankind, which is wealth. Money. Power through purchasing. Everyone likes you when you have money!

It’s like, let’s play a game, “If you lose, you lose your life but if you win, you become rich and powerful all of a sudden.” So, this game thing was for me, a point where I said “I don’t have to work anymore. I can just gamble a couple of hours and then make my daily wages many times over.” That’s the temptation.

For me that was like that. “I’m smarter than having to work all day for a meager paycheck. I’m better than that.” So there’s a lot of self-shaming and self pity, and also self-aggrandizing. Trying to get back. And then the problem is you always win it back.

But you don’t get to enjoy the money that you win. Never. You end up losing more and then borrowing more. And then you end up, sometimes, with the temptation of committing a crime to finance your fix — your gambling. In this way, there’s many blue collar crimes, fraud, but some people actually mug other people, or sell illegal stuff just to finance their gambling. In that aspect, it’s the same as any other addiction, where you get desperate and you are willing to do whatever, and you give up your moral code just to keep feeding the addiction.

I met people who go to 7-11 and blow their whole paycheck on scratchers. Just right there, in one sitting. Two hours: scratchers, scratchers, scratchers. Their whole paycheck in scratchers. A thousand bucks, right there. And I did the same thing!

When I worked, I’d make a hundred bucks a day, two hundred bucks a day, cash, which should go toward expenses, business, restocking, whatever. But I would go and say “Hey! If I double it then I’m okay.” You never do. If you do, then you go the next day and you will lose it all back. I do think people get superstitious or try to justify what they do.

But you’re gonna reach a point where, everybody calls it “the bottom.” Where you realize that nothing justifies the state you put yourself in. You have to hit your bottom. And I hit my bottom when I realized that my son’s welfare was being hurt too much.

The National Asian Pacific American Families Against Substance Abuse (NAPAFASA) is dedicated to preventing and reducing substance use disorder and other addictions in Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities through research, advocacy, education, and capacity building.

This series was produced by Advancing Justice-LA, with interviews recorded by StoryCorps, a national nonprofit whose mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate word. www.storycorps.org.

Advancing Justice-LA would like to thank the following Funders for their generous support of this project: The California Wellness Foundation, The California Endowment, Covered California, DentaQuest Foundation, and Walter and Shirley Wang.

Our mission is to advocate for civil rights, provide legal services and education, and build coalitions to positively influence and impact Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders and to create a more equitable and harmonious society.